1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of information management systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for implementing an agent architecture within an integrated document/ message management system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The average individual accesses and manages a surprisingly large number of messages and documents every day. In a typical business environment, the number of legitimate messages received and sent in the course of a day averages roughly fifty. These include emails, faxes, voice messages, voice calls, text messages, and instant messages. The number of devices that individuals use for communications and messaging has also multiplied. Such devices include computers, fax machines, wire-line phones, wireless phones, personal digital assistants (“PDAs”), and pagers, with each device typically handling a different type of message or method of communications. Most individuals today manage their messages across different media and, more importantly, over multiple types of devices.
Simultaneous with the proliferation of messages and messaging devices, the penetration of personal computers and servers in homes and offices has also risen sharply. The average individual accesses, creates, modifies, saves, and otherwise manages a large number of documents every day. This number is even larger when documents are broadly defined to include private and work-related databases as well. To complicate matters, documents are often transferred among individuals as stand-alone messages such as faxes, as attachments to electronic messages, as information embedded within messages, and as data files with attached messages.
To help manage the complexity of multi-media messaging over numerous devices, unified communications solutions consolidate different types of messages into a single platform. Many of these platforms allow for remote access and management of messages over the Public Switched Telephone Network (“PSTN”), the Internet, as well as other public and private voice and data networks. Increasingly, such solutions are also tied to communications systems themselves to allow both real-time and near-real-time communications. For example, many voicemail platforms enable users to use the call-back number of a voicemail sender to return a call during the course of retrieving a voicemail. The goal of unified communications solutions, therefore, is to allow users to access and manage different types of messages from a single access point, regardless of the user's device of choice. Through communications system interfaces, unified communications solutions also permit some limited communications (as opposed to retrieval and management of messages) from the same platform.
In the area of document and data management, solutions have generally taken the form of remote access to data storage devices that house documents and databases and the sharing of data on such devices based on a user's security level. The management of documents and data, however, has traditionally been viewed as a problem quite distinct from communications and the management of messages. Differences between data management solutions and communications/message management solutions, however, are becoming blurred as communications and message management solutions increasingly enable document access and transfer. Nevertheless, data management solutions and communications/message management solutions today remain, for the most part, quite separate.